


Water

by mysixthsenseisstubborness (Tvieandli)



Category: Soul Eater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tvieandli/pseuds/mysixthsenseisstubborness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All he did was get her water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water

He had an active imagination. A child fed on the wilds of a back yard left untended by neglectful parents. He once told his mother that he could see souls in their fleshy cages, all trapped up, and ready to explode out into the world. He’d told her that when she seized his arm as he brained a squirrel with a rock, and used a kitchen knife to pry it’s ribcage open. She had looked at him with horror struck into her eyes, and teeth nattering away into a sort of terrified insanity.  
That was maybe when she realized how bad things were.  
Some people hallucinated in color, saw the world go round, and round them in swirling shapes, and images so vivid they were real, but only in that person’s mind. He hallucinated in sounds, heard the scratching of bugs crawling through the dirt, and voices whispering his name in the quiet of the wee hours of the morning. Sounds that got louder as he got older, as he focused more on the idea of discovery, and how it would feel to cut open a cat, and take out all it’s insides.  
His mother went slowly worse though, falling into fits of depression the way he fell into fits of hearing, and locking herself away in her room saying that if the world saw her, the mother of a psychopath, she would never live it down. He would sometimes sit with her, and talk about his conquests in the neglected backyard, and how he’d caught lizards for hours, popping their heads off with his fingers to see their spines running the course of their little, scaly backs.  
All she ever deigned him with in those days were simple little words, and “that’s nice, honey”s that fell short of actual acknowledgement, and into the realm of complete indifference. It would tug his lips down into little pouts of dejection, watching her lie on her bed in the dark, eyes sunken, and far away.  
One day, she asked him to get her some water. He was gone for two minutes. It couldn’t have been more than two minutes. Little eight-year-old legs carrying him down the stairs to the kitchen, and back again with a glass filled to it’s spilling point with sweet liquid life. No more than two minutes, and there she was on the ground twitching, mouth foamed up with the powder of chewed sleeping pills, eyes rolled back into her head.  
That glass of water met it’s maker in the ground when it was dropped, and he rushed forward, hands on her arms trying to bring her back to reality. He’d already learned the lesson that if you cut something open it wouldn’t come back to life, so he just sat beside her, wondering what to do, trying to rouse her from her glassy eyed stare at the wall with the window in it.  
Light fell over them in bars as it seeped through the cracks in the blinds, and he waited beside her, trying to wake her up for hours until his father came home with his leather brief case.  
“Frank?” he asked, voice a waver in the dim light. “Frank what did you do?”  
He didn’t have an answer for his father, for the man standing there with wide eyes, and an open mouth. “I brought her water,” he said, pointing to the smashed glass, and the wet spot that had seeped into the hard wood. But that wasn’t good enough. That found his arm in a vice grip as he was hauled up.  
“Frank what did you do?”  
“We can put her back together!” he wailed, reaching wildly for the woman, as he was dragged out of the room and into the brightness of the hall.  
“No you can’t! You can’t put her back together! You killed her!”  
“I can fix it!”  
“You can’t!” the man bellowed, and the boy went quiet, chin falling onto his collar bone.  
“I got her some water,” he said again, dejected, and scared, because maybe he hadn’t understood her, but she’d always been there, and now he was alone. “She asked for some water, and I got her some,” he said, but it wasn’t enough, and the next day he was at an orphanage watching quietly as papers were signed, and he was disowned.  
He didn’t see why his father was angry. Recognized the anger, but didn’t understand it. He felt empty, watching the gray of the swings go in the yard with nasty children pumping their legs to get higher. He didn’t see the whole picture. Maybe the reason it wasn’t good enough for his father was that he didn’t cry.  
All he did was get her water.


End file.
